See, here is a big problem. Those are not "four scientists" despite the blog's title for them. They are 3 psychologists and one writer who once earned a PhD in neuroscience. None of those people do actual brain science for a living. If we can emphasize real neuroscience research and, w apologies to "social scientists (sic)," take the rest with huge grains of salt, we might get somewhere.
I have no problem with him getting fired and I have no doubt he knew this would get him fired and may have actually planned this whole thing to get a nice law suit going. It is a conversation that the left does not want to have.
Well he had already filed an NLRB complaint, so I think it might have been more that by that point he didn't care if they fired him for it. By that point it was a win-win situation, either they read what he wrote and give it consideration and potentially make some changes, or they fire him and make it a really big story.
That said, according to him, he was just really naive about the situation and thought that they would appreciate his input. That could make sense given that the kid only worked for less than 4 years in his life outside of academia.
I guess some don't want to have that conversation. Others don't see the point: the best part of America is based on giving people a fair shot, no matter who they are. For instance, Sam Harris is correct that people who lean toward conservative political principles are, in general, statistically less likely to want to pursue science and math. But no way no how do I want to see a company discriminate against someone b/c of their political leanings. So I think some people can have the conversation, admit that there are probably neurological gender differences (when taken on statistical average), but don't see much constructive point when there is SO much person-to-person variation. Overall, I agree with some of y'all more conservative posters on this: the knee-jerk left is really hurting itself by trying to crush every comment and sentiment that does not fit into the holy cannon. It's driving me flipping nuts at my university.
Both sides are overrreacting. It should be painfully obvious that these discussions go nowhere and only serve to stroke the egos are overly sensitive liberals and limp dicked MAGA bros.
A conversation about what exactly? How Google is one of the best public companies in the world? Or meritocracy?
You responded to my comment initially... about both sides overreacting. I assume you are on the left side.
Don't exactly agree with NPR's narrative in the article below. Many fields of study, besides computer science, now require students to program in Python, R, or some other language, especially at the graduate level. Most certainly true for majors like psychology; which is one reason why we should not discount liberal arts degrees in favor of H1B visas, so insincerely. Those academic fields have some kind of gender "parity" (or more so than computer science). One way to neglect and stunt intellectual curiosity of these students, and especially to keep gender disparities in tech going, may be to claim that these students do not have the skills , ambitions, or faculties to meet current job requirements in the tech sector - thereby justifying the issuance of temp visas to a group of people who are predominantly male (70%?). When Women Stopped Coding October 21, 20148:54 AM ET Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn't always been this way. A lot of computing pioneers — the people who programmed the first digital computers — were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising. What happened? We spent the past few weeks trying to answer this question, and there's no clear, single answer. But here's a good starting place: The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers. These early personal computers weren't much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing. And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture. Movies like Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds and War Games all came out in the '80s. And the plot summaries are almost interchangeable: awkward geek boy genius uses tech savvy to triumph over adversity and win the girl. In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers. This was a big deal when those kids got to college. As personal computers became more common, computer science professors increasingly assumed that their students had grown up playing with computers at home. Patricia Ordóñez didn't have a computer at home, but she was a math wiz in school. "My teacher realized I was really good at solving problems, so she pulled me and this other boy out to do special math," she says. "We did math instead of recess!" So when Ordóñez got to Johns Hopkins University in the '80s, she figured she would study computer science or electrical engineering. Then she took her first intro class — and found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they'd grown up playing with computers. "I remember this one time I asked a question and the professor stopped and looked at me and said, 'You should know that by now,' " she recalls. "And I thought 'I am never going to excel.' " In the '70s, that never would have happened: Professors in intro classes assumed their students came in with no experience. But by the '80s, that had changed. Ordóñez got through the class but earned the first C of her life. She eventually dropped the program and majored in foreign languages. More than a decade later, though, she returned to computers. She found a mentor, and eventually got a Ph.D. in computer science. Now she's an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Puerto Rico.
I do get where you are coming from in disputing whether the field of psychology qualifies as a true "science". The person I quote in my signature famously had the same sentiment. I think it should be pointed out that the "hard sciences", and I'll put neuroscience in that category for the sake of this discussion, generally ask much narrower questions. So while they are incredibly useful in finding answers to important fundamental questions with a high degree of confidence, they are less useful at answering "big" (in terms of scope, complexity) questions. To take an extreme example to emphasize the point, no one would seriously propose looking to physics to gain insight into human social interaction, even if ultimately we are just bundles of interacting matter/energy. And the fact that answers to questions in that space generally aren't accessible to the more rigorous scientific fields should also not diminish the importance of asking and trying to seek out the answers to them. We must settle for methodologies that are unable to provide the same level of confidence in their conclusions than what a physicist or chemist might demand. You may say such methodologies don't qualify as "science" as you understand it. Very well, but I think they are still useful for trying to gain some insight into these questions even if they can't provide definitive answers. This lack of definitiveness is why I reject claims from either side that these big questions regarding the biological differences between the sexes (or whichever groups under consideration) and the extent to which they yield different cognitive traits have somehow been settled by science.
What qualifies as an "overreaction" and what is "The Left?" I'm to the left of the current GOP but not to the left of many people I know, and I don't have a problem with firing this guy.
Google fails at achieving workplace diversity employee offers diverse perspective on how to improve workplace diversity Google fires him
An overreaction would be demanding that he should be fired or publishing misrepresentations of what he wrote with fantastically misleading headlines. The Left, to put it simply, is anyone who self identifies as having a uniformly politically left orientation.
Culture? Maybe interest in PC itself? Maybe it's not so much Women decline overall, but more interest by Men changes the % balance. Whatever it is, it's not global. CS major is a huge hit for Women in India. Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India In the U.S., the share of bachelor's degrees awarded to women has declined by 10% since 2000; in 2011, women earned only 18% of bachelor's degrees awarded in CS.4 It is thus no surprise that much research has focused on the underrepresentation of women in CS education, often portraying CS as a man's field.1,2,5However, this characterization is society-specific, not universal. Unlike in the U.S., women's participation in CS education in India has increased in the past 15 years in most nationally accredited institutes and universities;6,7,8 for instance, women constituted 42% of undergraduate students in CS and computer engineering in 2011 in India.3 They were and still are not the odd ones out, as the masculine perspective might hold. Rather, they enroll in CS because men and women alike see CS as a woman-friendly field. ... Conclusion Our study shows that socioeconomic context must be taken into consideration to understand how gender interacts with CS education in India. Lack of interest by women in CS should not be viewed as a global phenomenon; women may not show interest in majoring in CS in the U.S. and perhaps other Western countries but definitely go for it in India. Among all engineering-related disciplines, CS is viewed as the most attractive to Indian female students. Further, CS is viewed as a major pursued by intelligent students, helping boost their confidence, especially among women; prospects of a high-paying job leading to independence from family and parents motivate female students in CS to do well and complete a degree, an academic pursuit where strong mathematical skills are helpful. This fact contradicts many conventional assumptions, including that CS is a man's discipline and CS reliance on mathematical skills might be a hindrance to attracting female students. p.s. absolutely on liberal art; future will need more of those degree than of technical skills where many of those "less creative" technical skill be automated.
the left... they called his essay sexual harassment and fired him. what qualifies as sexual harassment? if you're a classic liberal or libertarian, i suppose you don't care at all. otherwise, we need to decide once and for all if making objectively qualified statements makes someone a bigot/extremist/idiot/harasser. frankly, you hearing or reading words, on your own volition, probably doesn't mean you were harassed.
"% decline in degrees awarded" != "% of undergraduate students" Nice try though. Again: for some, interest in programming may arise out of curiosity from wanting to program; while for others it may arise out of curiosity from needing to program. What seemed boring in CS 101 during your freshman year may be of great interest after 4 years of undergrad work as a Psychology major.
The inner conflict between @durvasa ' s need to appear as sanctimoniously empirical as possible and his mannosphere leanings are probably the only redeeming feature of this thread for me so far. 4/10
